


Another Life

by telm_393



Category: The Magnificent Seven (2016)
Genre: Childhood Memories, Epidemics, Gen, Infant Death, Tragedy, Vignette
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-15
Updated: 2018-11-15
Packaged: 2019-08-23 20:55:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 863
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16626287
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/telm_393/pseuds/telm_393
Summary: Soon after the Battle of Rose Creek, Red Harvest finds himself rocking a baby to sleep. In the winter of 1862, at nine years old, he did the same thing.





	Another Life

**Author's Note:**

> Context: in the early 1860s some groups of the Comanche were in the midst of a smallpox epidemic exacerbated by the fact that there had been even worse epidemics before that one, and there was also widespread famine and malnutrition among Plains peoples in general. 
> 
> Much like a fair amount of North American history, this story is a real downer. I'm saying it outright.
> 
> This was originally going to be part of another story I'm working on, but it didn't fit, so I made it a vignette and released it into the world anyway. If I got anything wrong, let me know. 
> 
> [Spoiler: Leni's baby does not die.]

Leni looks exhausted, whispering at her screaming child, and she really must be tired, because she lets Red Harvest walk to her and relieve her of the squalling baby before Horne can even offer.

Red Harvest holds the child stiffly at first, as if he hasn’t ever done so before, but his body remembers before his mind does, and it betrays him, it adjusts the baby to make her more comfortable, it rocks her back and forth, it paces to quiet her.

Red Harvest hates hearing babies cry, he hates hearing anyone cry, and so he lets himself sink into the part of him that knows how to make children calm. It works. The baby stops wailing and stares up at him instead, eyes owl-wide, and she gives him a smile. Red Harvest’s lips twitch.

Children are precious, and babies are the most precious of all, he thinks, because they’re not affected by the terrible things around them like everyone else is. They don’t understand pain. They don’t know what they’re going to be yet, even when their future is already laid out. They’re too little to break inside, just as long as they survive on the outside, and if they do survive, it means there is hope for what’s to come, that there will be life again.

There will always be life again.

Red Harvest is young, and it’s nighttime. It’s snowing again, but it’s a gentle snow. It falls from clouds that look like white smoke, and through them he can still see the sky. The moon is full and shining, the stars are bright, and he holds a baby in his arms. He remembers the night she was born, how happy everyone was that a child of their blood could be born at all after the death, smooth-skinned and bright-eyed and new and so beautiful. A miracle.

Now her mother is dead and so is her father, and she has barely eaten in two days, and the only other women with milk are long dead. There’s nothing for her.

She’s going to die. Tonight, tomorrow, soon enough. There were already so few people left in their band when she was born, and Red Harvest doesn’t know if there’ll be anyone left at all after this. Now the miracle of her birth seems more like a mistake than anything else, and he wonders why she was born at all, if this is all she's ever going to know. What a life. What a misery of a life.

Little puffs of white air escape her tiny mouth, and Red Harvest holds her close. She’s wrapped in a blanket, but it can’t protect her from what's coming. Nothing can.

It’s not supposed to be like this. He shouldn’t be holding her. Her mother should be holding her, or her father, or anybody that isn’t just some boy who doesn't have a mother or father either, but here he is, and no one seems to think much of it. Red Harvest is taking care of the baby. That’s normal now. Maybe what's normal is everything being wrong all the time, everything changing all time. He doesn't know if anyone in the whole world has ever been as tired as he feels right now, alive and well with a baby in his arms and more broken things behind and in front of him than he'll ever be able to piece together, ever be able to understand. He does things, but he never really knows what to do.

“But I will do everything I can for you,” he whispers to the child in his arms.

He sits down in the snow, all wrapped up in furs, and rocks her back and forth, sings to her in a low voice, songs he remembers from what seems a very long time ago.

When the sun comes up, she’s not breathing, and he presses a kiss to her forehead and is so sorry that the very best he could do was nothing at all.

Red Harvest blinks and he’s standing on the wooden floor of a white woman’s house in a white man’s town, holding a healthy blue-eyed baby, and he looks down at the child and whispers, "You'll grow up."

He looks at Leni. Her eyes are teary and he’s suddenly uncomfortable, anxious to hand the now-sleeping baby off to her. She takes the child from his arms with a gentle 'thank you', and he says, as if he can’t help it, as if he’s not even the one speaking, “I would have liked to have children.”

“You’re young yet,” she says. “You’ve still got a chance.”

Red Harvest thinks of the path he didn’t, couldn’t take, born too late. The one where the sickness didn't ruin his band, where he had a vision quest, where he married and had children, where he didn't ever taste horse meat, where he lived through more battles won than lost and never cared about a white man and died old in the same world he was born into.

He thinks of releasing the ghost of the dying child that still clings to him, and wonders if he ever had a chance.


End file.
